Emperor

XVI

The light faded, the long day dwindling into night. Brigonius and his party huddled with Tullio's staff in the prefect's tent.

Beyond the camp the country was wild. Brigonius heard shouts, screams, and there was a prevailing stink of smoke. The soldiers prowled around their watch posts, peering out into the dangerous dark.

To Brigonius's surprise, Tullio didn't send his forces out immediately to meet the enemy. During the night the sentries passed only despatch riders. On the old signal tower flags were raised and beacons lit, and across the turbulent countryside more pinpricks of fire lit up in response, as the mass mind of the army channelled and absorbed information about what was happening.

It soon became clear that the uprising had been coordinated. There had been strikes all along the line of the Wall, most of them rash suicide raids. And at the same time there had been a general rising in the countryside, with tax officials and councillors, many of them Brigantian themselves, abused, attacked, their homes ransacked. The most serious rising was to the west of Banna, where a pack of young men had torched the still-incomplete turf wall, kicked in the defensive ditch, and generally made a mess of the Romans' new frontier.

Through the night Tullio sat in his improvised command post, poring over maps and lists of detachment names and numbers on hastily setout tables. Records, charts, lists, information, information: even as the countryside boiled like a disturbed ant hill, communication, patience, thinking was the key to the Roman response. Sitting here Brigonius saw how very wrong Matto had been to resist the Romans' literacy, for it was the army's key weapon. Through words and numbers on paper Roman commanders were able to transmit their commands unambiguously across hundreds of miles, and the bloody lessons of the past were stored without error or distortion, for ever.

While Tullio and his staff worked, the Brigantian slave boy brought them food and more soldiers' wine. Brigonius wondered what was going on in the head of the boy, what he understood of the uprising. Where was his family-north of here, south? But families, even names, were irrelevant, once you were a slave; you had no past, no future, no purpose but that which your master assigned you. Even your children were slaves, and given litter names by your master: 'First-born' (Primigenius) perhaps, or 'Similar', or 'Runt'. But on a night like this, Brigonius thought, even the most docile slave must feel something stirring in his heart.

The long night wore on. Karus drank himself to sleep on a soldier's blanket. Xander, a nervous man surprisingly stoical in the face of a real crisis, wrapped himself in his cloak and sat quietly, eyes wide. Lepidina curled up against Brigonius, and Brigonius welcomed this echo of their brief love, though he knew she wanted no more than comfort. As for himself he could not sleep.

The sun was rising when at last the bugles sang. Brigonius left his companions sleeping, letting Lepidina slide off onto a blanket, and went out to see.

Units of soldiers were forming up, preparing to march out to meet the enemy. Brigonius overheard Tullio and his aides reviewing their information and giving commands to the junior officers. The Romans had delayed their response until they could assemble a sufficient countering force with detachments of the auxiliary units from Banna, other nearby camps, and the forts behind the Wall line. The legionary detachments assigned to Wall construction work were also gathering their weapons, but they were falling back, while other detachments from the legionary fortress at Eburacum, better prepared, were moving forward. The auxiliaries would do the brunt of the fighting while the legions would be kept in reserve, for no large-scale pitched battle was expected…

And so on. This was how the system was supposed to work. Thanks to its fast communications, detailed record keeping and flexible deployment the army, never numerically strong, was able to deploy rapidly and efficiently, focusing its energies exactly where they were needed most. The army itself was a high technology, Brigonius saw, honed and perfected over centuries of conquest.

Meanwhile the soldiers were individually preparing. Brigonius had worked with Roman soldiers for years. While they could sneer at the Brittunculi they had been posted to govern, they had come to seem disarmingly ordinary to him: ordinary fellows doing a job of work, wanting nothing but food, sleep and an occasional shag. But now he saw these men for what they were. In armour that fit like a second skin, wielding weapons with the casual intimacy of a lover's touch, they were barely human at all, he thought; they were slabs of muscles intent only on killing. And as they formed up in their tight disciplined units they seemed more formidable yet. Brigonius's heart felt heavy as he thought of the force that would face them, a rabble of disaffected Brigantian farm-boys stirred up by hotheads like Matto, armed with rusty weapons their grandfathers had been hiding in grain pits since the days of Cartimandua.